Friday, November 22, 2013

JOE BOYD and WHITE BICYCLES

director's cut, Time Out, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

White Bicycles,
Joe Boyd’s riveting memoir of his life as record producer and manager in the
1960s, is perfectly timed. British folk rock is freakily fashionable at the
moment, with Boyd protégés like The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Nick
Drake, and Fairport Convention revered as sacred ancestors by the new breed of
beardy American minstrels such as Devendra Banhardt. But the New Jersey-born
Boyd’s involvement in music extends way beyond gently-plucked acoustic guitars and
dulcet-toned troubadours.

He was the production manager at the Newport Folk Festival
of 1965 (it was Boyd who plugged in Dylan’s electric guitar that fateful
night), he co-founded the legendary London
psychedelic club UF0, and he produced Pink Floyd’s debut single “Arnold Layne”.
Boyd appears across the pages of White
Bicycles as an almost Zelig-like figure, popping up alongside legend after
legend: Muddy Waters, Roland Kirk, Eric Clapton, Duke Ellington, Nico, and--most
unlikely of all-- the pre-ABBA Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Frida, with whom he spent
an evening wassailing in Sweden. He shared a house in Laurel Canyon
with John Cale and even dated lovely Linda Peters, the future Mrs Richard
Thompson.

Unlike Zelig, though, Boyd was no bystander, but a crucial backroom
catalyst and enabler, or as he prefers, “an eminence
grise”.His career really took off
when he arrived in London
in late 1965. Swept up in the “incredible energy of 1966,” he neglected his day
job (setting up the UK
branch of Elektra Records) and became a prime mover on the city’s psychedelic underground.
With partner John Hopkins, he started UFO. “There were a lot more freaks in London than we’d
realized,” he recalls of the club’s wildfire success. “The great golden period
of UFO was from December 1966, when it opened, to April 1967, when “Arnold
Layne” came out. Then Hoppy and some of his pals at International Times threw the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream rave at Alexandra Palace, the one Hendrix and Lennon
turned up too, and there were a lot of cameras there. Almost instantly, UFO was
swamped by the curious.” Hard on the heel of these “tourists” came the media
and the law, resulting in tabloid horror stories about naked 15 year old girls
tripping out of their minds, police raids, and a drug bust for Hoppy.

The idea for UFO evolved as an offshoot of the London Free
School, an idealistic
“education for the people” venture operated out of a basement in Ladbroke Grove.
Renting a nearby church hall, Boyd and Hoppy staged a series of precociously triptastic
Pink Floyd sound-and-light shows to raise money for the LFS. “Then, we thought
‘why not raise some money for ourselves?’” chuckles Boyd. “We were both broke--I’d
lost the Elektra job, while Hoppy had been a photographer but had given it up
for ‘the revolution’. So starting UFO seemed like an obvious way to make a bit
of bread”

Among the more anarcho-yippie “heads” of the time, like
Grove hairy Mick Farren, the organizationally-skilled Boyd was regarded as suspiciously
bourgeois and business-savvy. But in this respect he exemplified a breed of
aesthete-entrepreneur who flourished in the Sixties--characters like Chris
Blackwell of Island Records (with whom Boyd’sproduction company Witchseason forged an alliance), Chris Stamp &
Kit Lambert (the team behind The Who and the Track label), Peter Jenner, Giorgio
Gomelsky, et al. All of these cats managed to walk the line between art and
commerce, the underground and the mainstream. Equally driven by a passion for
rock and a love of the hustle, record biz mavericks such as Denny Cordell and
Tony Secunda (the producer and manager behind the Move) are as vividly drawn in
Boyd’s memoir as far more widely known figures like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.Although Boyd similarly managed to balance
the demands of music and the bottom line, he says he wasn’t nearly as tough or
shrewd as the true players of the era. After recording “Arnold Layne”, for
instance, he was maneuvred out of any stake in Pink Floyd’s future.

Ironically, for someone at the swirling kaleidoscopic center
of London’s
freak scene, Boyd’s own approach to producing records shunned all the trippy
tricks that got slathered over music in the late Sixties, opting instead for a
warm and luminous naturalism. “I had a horror of making the hand of the producer
visible, so all those overdone studio effects like phasing and panning never
appealed,” he explains. “I felt it would date the music, whereas I always
wanted my things to be listened to in 50 years. For me the task of a producer
is to create the illusion of a band in a room playing together live in a real
acoustic space.” You can hear the timeless fruits of Boyd’s sensitive approach
on the White Bicycles double-CD of
Witchseason productions that’s coming out in tandem with the book.

And the title of the memoir? It’s an emblem, explains Boyd,
for all those “lovely ideas of the Sixties” that didn’t work out. It specifically refers to the Dutch Provos
scheme of distributing white bicycles around Amsterdam for people to use for
free—a utopian plan that worked fine for a while, “until by the end of 1967
people started stealing the bikes and repainting them”. Boyd explains that in
his increasingly desperate search for a title, he recalled that in the book he
identifies the moment when UFO faves Tomorrow performed their Brit-psych
classic “White Bicycle” as the absolute zenith of the Sixties, the peak before
the crash into disillusion and disintegration. The pinnacle occurred at “just
before dawn on Saturday, 1
July 1967.” If his sense of recall sounds suspiciously precise for someone
who surely ought to have been blitzed out of his gourd at the time, Boyd
anticipates any objections, confessing “I cheated. I never got too stoned. I
became the eminence grise I aspired
to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I was there, and I do
remember.”

White Bicycles: Making
Music in the 1960s is published by Serpent’s Tail on May 27th. The White Bicycles anthology of Boyd
productions is released by Fledgling.

Punk stalks the culture again. You can see this in the
success of Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, in which the director stars as a bad mother
whose combination of punk, stripper and junkie bears more than a slight resemblance
to Courtney Love. Then there’s the return of the Stooges, the group who defined
the punk sound and attitude with songs like “No Fun” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”
a good half-decade before the movement actually began, and who are about to
release The Weirdness, their first
album in thirty years.There’s Lady
Sovereign, the UK’s
rising rapper, who has recorded a version of the Sex Pistols “Pretty Vacant”
for an episode of America’s
most popular teenage TV drama, The OC.
And there’s also official commemoration of punk’s thirtieth anniversary in the
form of exhibitions like Panic Attack!
Art In the Punk Years (showing at London’s
Barbican Art Gallery
this June) and The Secret Public: the
Last Days of the British Underground 1978-88, on tour now following its
launch in Munich
last year.

Punk’s back, then. But when was it ever away? In truth,
there has barely been a single year since 1977 when some aspect of punk rock or
punk fashion has not been rediscovered or reworked. Punk’s ghost is a perennial
presence, serving as both inspiration and reproach to every new generation of
musicians, artists, and cultural radicals. Since its near-simultaneous
detonation in mid-Seventies New York
and London,
punk’s shockwaves have reverberated through every corner of the arts and
popular culture. It gave us pop icons like Kurt Cobain, Beastie Boys,
Morrissey, Green Day, and Bjork (her first band, formed when she was fourteen,
was the Icelandic punk group Spit and Snot). But punk also indelibly shaped
artists from outside popular music: film-makers like Jim Jarmusch, novelists
like Irvine Welsh and Isabella Santacroce, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Damien Hirst, fashion designers like Vivien Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
Through the Nineties and into this decade, punk’s legacy has cropped up in the
oddest places, from the gritty, stripped-down approach of the Dogme movement in
Scandinavian movie-making to the way designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui
rifle through the wardrobe of New Wave and Goth styles. John Richmond called
one of his lines of clothing “Destroy”, after the last word of the Sex Pistols’
“Anarchy in the UK”--the
same place Santacroce got the title of her second novel.

What’s so good about destruction? The idea of clearing away
the detritus of tradition and rebooting culture at Year Zero is always
attractive to the young, appealing both to their sense of iconoclasm and to
their ambition (one way to speed up your career is to discredit your
established elders who’ve clawed their way up the establishment hierarchy).
Punk’s who-gives-a-fuck attitude of snarling defiance and solipstic self-love
is galvanizing (“Anger is an energy”, as Sex Pistol singer Johnny Rotten put
it). Like a snort of cheap amphetamine, it gives the insecure-but-ambitious the
necessary boost of will-to-power to kick down the door.

Beyond the attitude, there’s two main reasons why punk
endures as a reference point:the
unsurpassable extremism of its style, and the contagious potency of its guiding
concept of do-it-yourself. As invented by couturiers like Westwood but also,
crucially, by the punk kids themselves, punk fashion consisted ofripped-and-torn clothes held together with
safety pins, hair slashed into spiky shapes and dyed inorganic shades of green
or pink, and a Marcel Duchamp-style repurposing of lowly readymades like
plastic garbage bags into garments. Punks also exploited the shock impact of
tweaking taboos, wearing fetish wear associated with sado-masochism (the famous
bondage trousers, where a strap connecting the two legs constrained one’s
movement), and even using forbidden and offensive symbols like the swastika.
The ice queen of this version of style as a kick-in-the-eye to straight society
was Siouxsie Sioux, one of the original London punks. Punk’s most abiding
fashion legacy is the Gothic culture spawned from the sepulchral sound and
visuals she created with her band the Banshees. Goth has been a fixture of
popular culture ever since, from movies like Donnie Darko to TV series like Buffy
the Vampire Slayer to the black eyeliner-wearing misery boys ofemo (short for emotional punk) such as My
Chemical Romance, currently riding high in pop charts across the world.

Punk’s do-it-yourself ideal arose out of disgust with the
early Seventies emergence of a remote rock star aristocracy, who played stadium
shows where they pranced onstage looking like distant ant-like figures to the
bulk of the audience and showed off their virtuosity with interminable
self-indulgent solos. Aiming to democratize music and open it back up to
teenagers, punk was deliberately primitive music, rock stripped down to
rudimentary three-chord-or-less riffs crudely bashed out on cheap electric guitars. “ This is a chord, this is another, this is a third - Now form a band" was the famous cover line of the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue (and zines themselves were
a prime expression of the do-it-yourself principle). The ultimate manifestation
of this ethos of anyone-can-do-it and irreverent non-professionalism was the
cassette underground, where bands sold tapes of their work for dirt-cheap
prices via mail order, or even gave the music away for free if you mailed them
a blank cassette. But more influential on the wider culture was the explosion
of independent labels in the postpunk period. Some were owned and operated by a
single band, others by socialistic musicians collectives, and others still by
aesthete-entrepreneurs who wanted to support innovative music but also saw a
market for experimental and edgy sounds. Almost all of the original punk
independents have long since perished, but a handful grew to become enduring
forces in contemporary music, such as Mute (home to Depeche Mode and Nick Cave)
and Rough Trade (the Libertines and the Strokes).

The independent label concept has proliferated far beyond
rock, giving rise to indie publishers, indie movie-makers, every kind of
autonomous cultural production you can imagine. But where the do-it-yourself
ethos lives largest is on the internet. Today’s blogs and livejournals are the
modern equivalent of the photocopied, hand-scrawled, cut-and-paste fanzines of
the punk era--sometimes collaborative ventures, but far more often, lone voices
yelling out their angry and excited opinions and finding a niche audience of
like-minds. And then there’s Myspace, which fuses the independent micro-label
with the fanzine to create the ultimate expression of the do-it-yourself
impulse: bands uploading their own music to circulate for free. Do-it-yourself
is the empowering lesson that every generation, bored and alienated by what the
mainstream offers, has to rediscover for itself. In that sense, punk will never
die.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

THIS HEATThis HeatDeceitThe Wire 1992 (?)

by Simon Reynolds

These reissues are mementoes of an unimaginably different
Brit-rock era than ours. Today's indie bliss-rock aims to engulf us
in 'dreamtime', simulates the effects of drugs; back then (1979-81)
the goal was to wake us from our mass culture sleep, rouse us from
addiction to TV and pop. Demystification was the goal; alienation
was both aesthetic strategy and subject matter.

Along with Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti, Pop Group,
Throbbing Gristle et al, This Heat forged the syntax of the
post-punk avant-garde: synth-drones and squelches; hissing,
programmed percussion; tape-loops and found sounds; effects-ridden
guitar; creepy vocals. Rhythms had a ciphered relation to reggae or
disco rather than rock'n'roll, vocals recalled the lugubrious
Englishness of Robert Wyatt; American rockism was stoutly resisted.
Both "This Heat" and "Deceit" are haunted by the standard-issue
spectres of the 1979 worldview: fear and disgust at the amnesiac,
anaesthetic comfort of domesticity; anti-consumerism; dread of
nuclear annihilation. What This Heat and co feared most was sleep:
every element of their music was designed to put you on edge.

Groove was mostly foregone in favour of brittle, fractured tempos;
when it did appear, funk had a foreboding compulsion. Elsewhere,
This Heat made ambient music, but without the flow, without the
repose. "Horizontal Hold" cuts from blistering feedback to arid,
timebomb tick-tock dub to an abrasive funk-scrabble. "Not Waving"
sounds like Robert Wyatt languishing in a dungeon while mice scamper
over Ivor Cutler's harmonium. "Independence" is a mirage of
Oriental reggae, gorgeous and deadly like a jewelled cobra.

In 1979, this music was meant to be the dawning of a brave,
all-new frontier. In truth, the post-punk avant-garde was really a
resumption of the techniques of the pre-1977 experimental fringe
(Henry Cow, Art Bears, Faust, Can, Soft Machine, Residents etc) with
a different agenda and more apprehensive aura. With the world scene
getting more apocalyptic by the day, This Heat's unsettled and
unsettling music seems more timely than it has for a long while.

review of This Heat's debut album reissued for

This HeatThis Heatemusic 2006

by Simon Reynolds

This
Heat are regarded as one of the archetypal post-punk vanguard outfits.
Which they were, but the fact is that this South London trio were just
as much a post-psychedelic band, with audible roots in the UK's
progressive underground of the early '70s. In 1975, even as Patti Smith
and the Ramones released their debuts, This Heat's drummer/vocalist
Charles Hayward was playing in Quiet Sun, a jazz-rock combo led by Roxy
guitarist Phil Manzanera. This Heat's slogan was "All possible
processes. All channels open. 24 hours alert," and those first two
sentiments could easily have been endorsed by proggy weirdos like Van
Der Graaf Generator, Gong, or Can. But the third plank of that
mini-manifesto marked This Heat as true contemporaries of Scritti
Politti and the Pop Group, its totally-wired tone of paranoid vigilance
tapping into the atmosphere of tension and dread that suffused the late
'70s.

Political anguish — fears of nuclear armageddon,
of a right-wing backlash reversing the gains of the '60s, of an
emerging police state — suffused This Heat's music, creating a vibe a
world away from the whimsical meander of pre-punk noodlers like Soft
Machine. Nonetheless, you can still hear This Heat's proggy past come
through on their self-titled 1979 debut in the Robert Wyatt-like
plaintiveness and Englishness of Hayward's vocals and the undisguised
virtuosity of his drumming, as well as in the group's tell-tale penchant
for disjointed structures. More post-punk DIY-noisy in spirit and sound
are the contributions of Gareth Williams, a non-musican who supplied
jarring blurts and abstract smears using broken-down instruments,
effects-pedals, and a primitive form of sampling involving tape loops.

This
Heat could be propulsively, even convulsively rhythmic: the eerie
percussive timbres and frenetic beats of "24 Track Loop" offers an
astonishing audio-prophecy of '90s drum 'n' bass, while "Horizontal
Hold" cuts from blistering feedback, to a time-bomb tick-tock of Cold
War skank, to an abrasive funk-scrabble, But the group were equally
effective making a kind of ambient music, albeit of a decidedly
non-tranquilizing sort. "Not Waving" sounds like Wyatt languishing in a
dungeon where the rats scuttle morosely over the keys of a decrepit
harmonium. "Late-prog," "post-punk" — either way you slice it, This Heat
is a category-collapsing classic.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it’s easy to forget
that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists.
Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds
you what an inclement listen the
group was at the start.Sure, there’s a
couple of Scream tunes as catchy as “Hong Kong Garden” (which appears twice here on the
alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). “Mirage” is a
cousin to “Public Image,” while the buzzsaw chord-drive of “Nicotine Stain”
faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people. But one’s first and lasting
impression of Scream is shaped by the
album’s being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and
fractured, the opener “Pure” is an “instrumental” in the sense that Siouxsie’s
voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field.
Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track
“Switch” is closer to a songbut as
structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”.

Glam’s an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment
when psychedelia turned dark: “Helter Skelter” is covered (surely as much for
the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay’s flange
resembles a Cold Wave update of1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie’s singing
channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired “Jigsaw Feeling,”
there’s even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson
Airplane tunes like “Two Heads.” Another crack-up song, “Suburban Relapse”
always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with
badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie’s suspicion
not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through
in the fear-of-flesh anthem “Metal Postcard,” whose exaltation of the inorganic
and indestructible (“metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my
master-scheme”) seems at odds with the song’s inspiration, the anti-fascist
collage artist John Heartfield.

Scream is another
Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse.McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously
quit the group on the eve of the band’s first headlining tour, and their
replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles
such as‘Staircase Mystery” and the best
bits of Join Hands, does momentarily
make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might
have pursued if they’d stayed together and stayed monochrome ‘n’ minimal.

The Creatures : Demon Hunters

The Observer, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

From
her punk beginnings as style terrorist through her early Eighties reign as
godmother of 'Goth' to the almost motherly figure she now presents, Siouxsie's
career with her group The Banshees has seen her pass through a fascinating
array of personas. There has even been the occasional alter ego.

In
1981 she formed The Creatures with Banshees' drummer Budgie. Despite the
abrasive minimalism of their sound (just vocals and percussion), a contrast to
the lurid rock of The Banshees, The Creatures scored a series of hits ranging
from the bacchanalian 'Mad-Eyed Screamer' to their melodramatic cover of Mel
Torme's 'Right Now' in July 1983. Now, after six years of hibernation, Siouxsie
and Budgie have reactivated The Creatures.

Siouxsie
explains this latest extra-curricular excursion: "The Banshees carry a lot
of luggage in terms of what they mean to our audience, and it's difficult to
write in a spontaneous way for an established group format. Your ideas have to
be mediated through other people.

"With
The Creatures, things are less precious, so there's less at stake now."

The
Creatures' 1983 debut album, Feast, was recorded in Hawaii. For the follow-up, Boomerang
(just released), the duo once again fled the 'battery hen' schedules of London studios. They
transported a mobile studio to a ranch in rural Spain, just north of Cadiz.

"When
you're cut off, you react more instinctively. We recorded the album in the
heart of a rural community, with their age-old superstitions and their love of
the bullfight."

The
Creatures' single, 'Standing There', is a product of Siouxsie's mixed feelings
for Spanish culture. Her admiration for the flamboyance and female strength of
flamenco is countered by a disgust for bullfighting. "I see it as
glorified slaughter, I don't go along with the romanticisation of rural life.
If you look at country people's relation to nature, you can see that they're
almost at war with it, trying to make it do what they want it to."

Now
vegetarian, Siouxsie's conversion came "partly through touring, being
provided with backstage food and seeing all the day-to-day waste, the
bucketloads of chicken drumsticks." Giving up meat was just one facet of
"a whole cleansing and rethinking" of body and soul around 1985 that
involved also giving up smoking, cutting down on alcohol and taking up circuit
training. "Growing up and adolescence last way beyond your teens, and
after a while you find it frustrating that you can't harness your energies.
I've always wanted to be in control of myself."

Now
31, the new holistic Siouxsie seems odd when, in both the Banshees and The
Creatures, she has always been interested in people who can't control
themselves; the obsessive, the disturbed, the unbalanced. For a herbivore,
Siouxsie's music has strangely preyed on listeners' fears.

"I
think that's putting the aggression in the right channel, using it to create
rather than destroy. Everyone has demons. Unless they're allowed an outlet they
fester and eat away at your body."

For
over a decade, Siouxsie has been one of the few challenging female icons to
maintain a high profile in the pop mainstream. "I'd hate to be thought of
as a role model, but pop culture has always been geared to presenting one view of
the female – blonde, manipulated, pliable. Maybe my having black hair and being
like Beryl the Peril provides another archetype for people to use."

Siouxsie
seems to belong to the Gyn/Ecology school of feminism. Does she believe
that women have a monopoly on caring and men a monopoly on destruction?

"No,
but the male performer has been done to death. The female artists who are now
acquiring the kind of control and self-expression hitherto the preserve of men
are producing the only new music around. I think that the female is the
future because she's not violent or as territorial, as inclined towards
conflict that leads to either big-scale war or pub-room barracking. Man, in the
traditional sense, is like a dinosaur. A dying breed."

Q & A with STEVE SEVERIN (2003)

Seems like the sharpest people in the original punk scene
were making their excuses and leaving as early as the first months of 1977!
Didn't you yourself say something like it was all over when The Damned first
played?!

“That was kind of true. When The Damned played it was like
the first elements of the pantomime horse coming in. Punk was already getting
uniform and predictable. That whole brief period before people like the Damned
came along, before we even played-- it didn’t even have a name.”

Did you have a strong initial concept when you formed?

“The original Banshee idea was a pure musical democracy.
There was no lead instrument --not the voice, not the guitar, which usually
dominated. Everybody occupied their own space, melodically and rhythmically.
I’ve never seen the bass as a supporting instrument at all, I always think of
it as a driving instrument. That’s what very different about the early Banshees
stuff. You cannot sit there as a singer-songwriter with a guitar and play those
songs in a pub--it’s not buskable, because the instrumentation and the way it’s
playedis crucial. A big inspiration for
that was Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, who I saw at the Royal Albert Hall in
the early Seventies. It blew me away. I’d never dreamed that instruments could
be played that way before."

One of the most interesting things about the Banshees is the
way you’ve excelled at being both a singles group and an albums band. Some of
the best work is the singles that weren't even on the albums. But the albums,
equally, have all been cohesive, unitary listening experiences.

“That would be the mixture of influences--liking people like
Cluster and Neu! and Can, but also loving T.Rex and a whole generation of good
singles. The two main people we all loved, Roxy Music and Bowie,did great singles and great albums. We saw the single as the calling card. Our first
single, the A-Side, "Hong
Kong Gardens",
was the most commercial song we’d written to date, but the B-Side,
"Voices", was the strangest piece of music we'd written to
date."

The Banshees never had any truck with that side of punk
which was about ordinary blokes getting onstage. The side that related maybe to
Stiff Records and pub rock.

“Oh no, we hated
that. I never understood where that do-it-yourself ethic came from. It was so
patently obvious that not everybody could do it. You had to have a modicum of
talent. And an original idea. But for one moment the floodgates came open and
everybody had their five minutes, put their single out, and then disappeared
back to what they were destined to do in the first place. It was so diverse at
the beginning, under the umbrella term 'punk' you had Wire, Buzzcocks,
Throbbing Gristle, This Heat… They were so obviously not using the Ramones as
an identikit for what they were doing.

"Wire and Buzzcocks were the two bands that we felt
somewhat kindred spirits with at the time. They seemed to share this naivete
about song structure. Wire especially, every song seemed to have a different
format to it just to make it different. What they shared with us was the fact
that the concept was more important than the ability--you can hear both bands
really striving to get to the level of being strong enough to put across their
ideas. But the writing is strong enough that you can get away with it. One of
the things I still do to this day is, I never practise. Never have. I like
being stretched. If I know how to play too well, I get lazy. "

My friend Chris Scott wrote a piece on incompetencefor this music
fanzine we did called Monitor and he talked about Scream-era Banshees and how
you could hear humans struggling with their musical instruments, and how that
physicality created a thing-iness in the music, like the sounds were objects
being grappled with strenuously. Whereas later on, when the more conventionally
accomplished John McGeoch and Budgie replaced John Mackay and Kenny Morris, the
Banshees became more about "atmosphere". (Like "a sofa" is how Chris put it, and
it wasn't intended as a compliment).

“The physicality was
very important to us then…We grew up
playing live, there wasn’t a kindergarten period where we were learning to play
Clapton riffs in our bedrooms. So we were struggling, trying to find a way of
mastering the instrument to make your ideas come across. With the first album we’d been playing those
songs for two years and so there was one way of doing them, playing live in the
studio. It was only later when we had more time to explore the studio that we
started writing songs in the studio, based around some of the sounds we could
create in the studio. But the first two albums, The Scream and Join Hands, are
live, physical albums."

By the time we get to 1982 and A Kiss In the Dreamhouse,
it's almost like a totally different band. That album is very much a studio-confection,
lushly textured and voluptuous-sounding, a world away from the cold, stark
severity of Scream and Join Hands.

“Just better drugs!”

Oh, had you all plunged into a psychedelics phase?

“My psychedelics phase had been over by about thirteen years
or something! But Siouxsie and Robert Smith were doing quite a bit. They were
discovering it for the first time. Kiss
was a lot about me and McGeoch thinking about the Beatles and The Stones circa
Beggar’s Banquet. We'd done Juju and that had been so focused, and now we were
onto our "second album" as that incarnation of the band, so we could
do anything. The whole record started with the lyric for ‘Cascade’. I wrote this poem and then honed it down to a
lyric, and I felt really odd about it, like, 'Is Sioux going to sing this?"

The lyrics with their imagery of moisture suggest that you
were consciously proposing the melting of the Ice Queen.

“I was aware that we were moving on. Not so much changing
the image but tapping into things that were already there but not exposed. Kiss came out of a mixture of things--I
was reading late 19th Century decadent stuff like Baudelaire and Huysman's Against Nature. But also Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company, where the
imagery is very lush, sensual, and exotic. That decadence and sensuality
corresponded with everybody else feeling the same way in terms of
instrumentation. Like, 'why not try some flute here?' We were playing with other people's
expectations of what the Banshees were. And also tapping into an English heritage
of whimsical psychedelia-- Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. 'Green Fingers' is quintessentially
English psychedelia, it's not American or kandy-kolored.

"A Kiss in the
Dreamhouse, it was a strange time really because we felt we had complete
creative freedom. We just felt we could do anything and get away with it. Mike
Hedges, the producer, owned the studio so we could pretty much go in and stay
there as long as we wanted. So we pretty much wrote it all in the studio. We
were also, in the background, getting divorced from our first manager. So it
felt like there were no constraints of any kind, in terms of where we felt the
band should be going. We kind of felt the audience would go with us wherever we
went."

Mike Hedges had a good 1982--as well as Kiss, he produced The Associates's Sulk, another psychedelia-tinged
fiesta of sensual delirium. An important
figure?

"Yes, Mike was one of those engineer/producers who had
tons and tons of ideas, and open to experiment."

"Painted Bird" could almost be a purpose-built
anthem for the emergent Goth Nation as represented by a hefty contingent of the Banshees audience--all about
using style and flamboyance to "confound that dowdy flock".

“I don’t think Siouxsie meant it like that--it’s one of the
few songs that directly taken from a source, Jerzy Kozinki's book of the same
name. But yes, you can read that into the song, and 'Fireworks' similarly can
be read as a manifesto."

What did you think of the whole Goth movement?

"It's very obvious why as a phenomenon it wasn't
something we really wanted to get attached to. And a lot of Goth purists
wouldn’t put us in their pantheon of Goth gods, simply because we’re too
diverse musically. Goth was reacting much more to the way Siouxsie looked. To me, what people nowadays call Goth is someone
like Marilyn Manson. I can see why he’s a very necessary force in the world. I can’t stand his music but I think he’s
articulate, intelligent, and I think Middle America
needs him. England
and Europe don't need him, but there is a
point in every thirteen year old’s life when they need someone like that to
latch onto. For me it was Bowie.
A much more intriguing proposition, because there was so much more ambiguity.
The other thing about Bowie,
on account of him being such a culture vulture, was that you'd find out about
other stuff through him. Burroughs, or the Velvet Underground and The Stooges.
And that was because he was stealing from them! I didn't know anything about
Iggy and the Stooges until Bowie
mentioned them. He was totally educational. But I can imagine if I was 12 today I might be a Marilyn Manson fanatic. I could possibly
be quite evangelical about it. I mean, what are the alternatives? Travis?!?”